We’ve effectively eliminated boredom from our lives, and that sucks. Boredom is super important not just for our mental health, but in my view also for qualifying as sentient creatures.
I miss the old internet because it was a time you could meet up with old friends and connect and stay in touch with each other.
A few things changed, though. First, enshittification of services. You used to go on Facebook and just SWIM in the lives of other people. Now it’s just promoted content. Second–related to the post–is rage was recruited to encourage engagement. Third, people’s behavior online shifted towards tribal identification, towards rage baiting the other side, towards performativity; and I honestly don’t know how much of that I can lay at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg.
I also miss the old internet because truly random things had a chance to make the rounds. Cracked.com had some of the finest writing I’ve ever read. Nowadays with SEO and official tie-ins (Forbes.com has a deal with Google), the only way to be seen is to spend money, and the only reason to spend money is to make money, so most everything online is now directly or indirectly an advertisement. AI only accelerated this process.
I think this is why Reddit became as huge as it did, because the weirdness still had a chance, and because people want to talk to each other. And now we have Lemmy.
We keep making and finding new islands as the waters continue to rise, but we used to roam the plains.
Yeah, I want to interact with people who are making/sharing stuff for the love of the game, not trying to be influencers or sell me something.
Capitalism Enshittifies The Internet - Scammers and Influencers Version©®™ 😂🤣
That last line is a powerful analogy and exactly how it feels.
Internet tech companies have perfected the art of enshittifying a service. Internet services these days practically follow a playbook of, 1.) hook users, 2.) build a walled garden, 3.) exploit users. Basically the EEE of the user-driven web. Pretty much every company at this point, both old and new (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok, Discord, Twitter, Netflix) follow this exact pattern.
Modern UI design, dark patterns, deprecating services while raising prices, “install our app!”, etc. We didn’t have this in the days of IRC, Usenet, all that other good stuff before corporate web came around.
AKA, the Internet matured and became corporate like every other form of media before it.
Very nicely put
You’re not describing the old Internet.
So what are they describing?
The 2000s internet.
26 years ago is pretty old, in relation to the lifespan of the internet
What’s before then then?
That would be the classical era of the internet, just after the baroque internet which in turn followed the renaissance internet.
If you go back further you’ll find the internet of late antiquity, the ancient internet before that, then finally the pre-internet which we can only study through physical media since it was the era prior to the earliest known examples of the internet.
What percentage of people do you think had the internet in 1995?
The Internet in 1995 was an amazing place. You could find so many scholarly articles and weird funny sites, but every place to chat was full of creepy old men trying to meet kids. Which we thought was hilarious until we got a bit older and realized some of our friends were trying to meet them back. You’d accidentally find all manner of horrific shit, but there was information available. It wasn’t all true but it was almost all honest.
Which is wildly different from today where it feels like almost none of it’s honest. Even the stuff that’s true is only selectively true and trying to manipulate us into a worse place.
In the nineties fox news was strong and we were already experiencing a lot of it’s style of selective truth coupled with outright lies from other places, too. On the Internet at the time it was a lot easier to avoid that stuff.
Not 0? This chain is confusing. I guess a lot of you are young and me pointing out a truth really bothered y’all. Sorry gen Z.
Bullshit. The technology WAS better.
Text communication took like, 28 Mb of RAM and was blazing fast, and a single chat application like Pidgin could interoperate with ALL of them.
❤️
How accessable was the old internet for visually impaired people?
While I appreciate the heavy handed strawman argument, it was entirely possible to make the old internet more accessible to those with disabilities WITHOUT making the technology worse in every single other way.
Mixed and depending on the year. Hardware was available, (braile and speech syth) but it was expensive as hell. There was a bit of a crisis when we went from dos to windows. None of the early GUI supported any of the hardware. In 95 you could use JAWS screen reader. Navigator 4 and IE5 were shit for a while until they started supporting it. Graphic images were still a problem, even after ALT tags became available, trying to get content makers to use them was a fight.
To say nothing of Flash. Sighted navigation was nontrivial.
oh god yes, flash and shockwave were awful. When my company used flash they also put text-only versions of the site up behind the scenes, but we were in the minority
So many mid-century googie disasters with bitcrushed sound effects whenever you so much as looked at a button. Homestar Runner isn’t a parody, it’s just how the web was. Toons! Toons! Chawacte–! Stooore!
The most personally nostalgic version of this still accessible is surely some PC Gamer demo disc launcher. Coconut Monkey era navigation by bouncing around a starship to run the Final Fantasy VII installer. That presumably still works, too, since the most stable Linux API is Win32.
That’s not it at all. The internet used to be a multitude of small sites. A true bazaar made by individuals, visited by individuals in their web browsers.
Now it is all the 5 biggest platforms trapping users in their apps and doing their best to wall everything off.
Bring on NomadNet!!!
or Gemini Protocol,
They’re both great retro, but sadly they’re largely missing interesting content ;(
See, when you open the front (web) page for the Gemini protocol, it looks like an actual human wrote that. When you do the same for NomadNet, it looks like (and with your computer fans sounds like) an investor cash grab. That’s probably why I don’t recall about the latter despite researching adjacent tech a lot before.
https://unsigned.io/rnode_bootstrap_console/s_nn.html
nomadnet is a application that’s a subnet of reticulum
reticulum provides the mesh and ssl transport, nomadnet is a hosting platform built on it. no cash involved.
i think the easiest path to trying out nomad is liam cottle’s (meshtastic guy) meshchat https://github.com/liamcottle/reticulum-meshchat he added support for nomad net
Cool.
Actually, I have heard of it, here to be precise. I guess the front page threw me off so bad that my brain filtered it out like it never happened.
yeah there’s a lot of stuff out there. I’m in to meshtastic/meshcore but have found them to be wanting.
I’ve also been playing with HaLow and Reticulum (30mbps), but the price and availability of the radios are rough.
I’m also hosting a little i2p, but more just to stay up on the tech, i2p is a lot dodgier and the available Android app appears to have tracking abilities.
The thing about AIM, was “OMG this person is available to chat instantly, right here, right now!” A lot of people didn’t have text messaging, or they did but it was expensive, so being able to chat remotely meant calling them on the phone, or you and the other person happened to be online at the same time.
I remember the day that the Old Internet died for me.
I saw my buddy was online on AIM, and I messaged him looking to shoot the shit. But he had just gotten a smartphone, and was logged into AIM on his smartphone, and it was not a good time for him to be shooting the shit because he was out and about doing stuff. So he was like “what do you need? I’m busy”.
Which is not something anyone had ever told me on AIM before. If you were on AIM you were by definition bored and looking to shoot the shit.
I guess we grew up too.
Ouch.
back when using your real name on social media was idiotic
Still is
My mom then: don’t put any personal information on the internet!
My mom now: I just need to put my social security, credit card info, and full street address and I can see which Seinfeld character I’m most like!
Also it was made to be fun and chill. You logged on talked to a few people end of transaction. You weren’t mined for data. They weren’t pushing ads and content based on your history. Myspace and aim just did a thing and you did that thing. Now the thing does you.
Nah, I’m nostalgic for the time when a chat was just a chat, not a signal to be analyzed, monetized, advertised, and propagandized.
Yeah, it was cool exploring the space without being monitized.
And when chat logs were just saved as text files on your PC.
This and the old internet was largely non-commercial compared to today. It was the “small” internet of passionate nerds, academics, and techies who needed an outlet for their passion. I remember being confused when I learned the “.com” was intended for commercial web sites only, because most personal websites people had were “.com”
The old internet was decidedly anti-commercial.
I remember very well people being revolted by online advertising and how it commercialized a free place.
They were right.
yeah once you found a niche community you had knowledgeable people that would at least reply by the weekend, and expert advice would be free just because some guy was happy a stranger liked the same things.
You just had to be confidently wrong enough to aggro the guy that actually knows his shit.
Maybe that strat was always around but I associate it more with the later 2.0 web
Can confirm, 39 year old here. The internet was fun from the mid 90s to mid 00s. People made content for fun, educational purposes, or to provide a service someone needs or would find useful. You “went on the internet” to chat with weird strangers and download media. It was fun. Now almost my entire life is the internet - my job, errands (banking, shopping, appointments) relaxation time (tv shows on streaming service, music and podcasts in one app). And in each of those things, bombarded with ads, privacy invaded, personal data stolen… we are way too reliant on the internet
I miss flash games like pogo.com and stuff
Check out flashpoint archive.
The balloon popping game or as a standalone, bloody pingu smash.
I have probably hundreds of hours on Yahtzee on pogo loool
Smartphones ruined the internet.
When you needed to sit at a computer, use a keyboard, and spend a bit of time to write out thoughtful content, the quality of the discussion and community on the internet was so much higher. With smartphones, they had to dumb down the UI, consolidate content and reactions into likes and emojis, and generally just had to deal with smaller, more unsubstantive and rage-baity comments.
Plus, there’s just the undeniable fact that computer users are more tech-savvy than people who only know how to use a smartphone. Making the internet smartphone friendly opened the floodgates up to a sea of low-quality engagement.
Before smartphones, we would go outside, live our lives, then come home and see what happened on the internet that day. When the internet started following us around in our pockets on crippled devices that are designed for consumption and cheap-ass engagement, that’s really when the internet went to shit.
I put off getting a smartphone until like 2015. I was 21 and was one of the last of my friends not to have one. My argument against it was precisely that: “I don’t want to be online all day and I know that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
I didn’t even buy my first smartphone. My sister gave it to me. It stayed in the box for six months. I so so did not fucking want it.
Work forced me into keeping a smart phone. The key fob I was using for MFA died and they were no longer replacing them so I had to use the app.
Smart phones ruined everything. It was fun when I was the only one, hyperbole. I had smart phones while my peers in grade school finally started getting hand me down flip phones. I was like this is great; playing Zelda on a gameboy emulator, or on the next phone that had the same specs as my first pc and playing Duke Nukem 3D. Being able to browse the internet.
Now it’s devolved to a chain collar on your neck as you’re expected to answer the phone all the time and even places of work require you to have a phone to use their cr’apps. Scan this QR code. Ram this up yass, oh wait. At this point I hate phones. I plan to switch to a garmin watch with phone capabilities. I mean 95% is just spam these days for me.
We could create forums that can only be logged on to using a desktop browser. Sure, some mobile users with basic tech savvy could install some spoofer that still let them access the site. But that’s still mission accomplished. You’re still requiring some technical competence.
Lemmy is like that to some extent. The fact that users have to pick an instance is, for a lot of people, too much overload and drives them away. But I see it as a filter. You have to have some absolute minimum baseline level of understanding and proficiency of the platform you’re using. That’s why the massive number of people on Facebook, etc. are oblivious to how they’re being exploited by the platform, because they don’t understand what it is or how it works.
No, it’s because it wasn’t full of bots and shitty content created solely for the purpose of generating clicks. People created content to have fun and share their passion, not because they wanted to be a professional influencer.
The internet was much better before people figured out how to make money off of it.
I was using the Internet at a time when people took it being non-commercial completely seriously. You never saw ads because, as a community, we had decided that ads were not allowed. It was completely decentralized, so you might be running your own server, but if you put an ad on your server other people would get mad at you for it. This was pre-WWW and then a bit of the early days of the WWW.
Then there was a period where ads, commerce, shopping, etc. were possible and permitted. But, that was still the minority of things. There were thousands of web pages full of mythology and folklore for example, that people had just put up because that was something they were interested in. Running a web page cost you next to nothing, so there was no need to put ads on it. You could use Yahoo to find those sites, and I guess Yahoo was commercial by that point, but if it had ads they were small and unobtrusive.
Over time, things got more and more commercial. You saw ads more and more often. But, at least then it was ads on static content, or ads on a forum or something. It wasn’t an infinite algorithmically-generated feed optimized to keep you engaged.
There was a lot to like about that super early non-commercial Internet. But, I don’t think that was the peak moment though. Some ads and early for-profit services made it better. I think the thing that really wrecked it was the lack of competition. When there are 100 commercial services fighting over your attention, they can’t collude, you can boycott one, etc. When there are 5, you basically have to accept whatever they give you.
It’s not figuring out but just waiting until there are more non-nerds moving in that new market and then start monetizing as the market reaches critical mass for their particular niche.
Well, then the Internet wasn’t a capitalist shithole. It was only a shithole.
